All posts tagged: wheatpaste

The
Street Artist called The Post Man is delivering celebrities to the
city’s streets lately, usually with a cityscape inside of them. The
campaign of high saturation portraits are part of one that is often in
street art practice: parading, adoring, exulting our pop culture icons,
alive or dead. They somehow represent the culture, these reoccurring
personas, these musicians, poets, actors, – they have superseded their
categories and become part of our common dreams.

Marilyn, Elvis, Amy, Jimi, Nile Rodgers, Philip Seymour Hoffman (as Truman Capote): some of these are part of a golden circle of intermittent images that year after year we all circulate, share, wear, frame, hang on a wall, send in the mail. This time The Post Man is bringing them directly to the streets for your entertainment.

South of Hollywood Road in Hong Kong is often referred to as the SoHo of the city, steeped in neverending staircases that scale the pitched incline and pinched into back alleys full of skinny cats, fashionably urban youth, and a fair amount of homegrown organic graffiti and Street Art.

A home away from home for the Italian Mr. Barlo, who has explored his ideas on the streets here for four years or so, today we have examples of the creative range of ideas he is experimenting with in new wheatpastes and a recent mural (for HK Walls this spring).

“ ‘The Pet of the Archeologist’ – This is the last wall painted over the weekend for @hkwalls 2018. This is a concept born quite a while ago in Hong Kong for a wall in Hong Kong but never had the chance to be done properly. It also made me think that it has been ages since I painted a mural in the streets of this crazy city that I call home(-ish).”

All of these pieces are meant to be discovered – scattered as they are among the winding streets and backsides of increasingly chic boutiques, quirksome art galleries, and sleekly dark bars.

” ‘La città inquieta” (unresting city)’ – This is the first of a series that I am determined to push forward through 2018 – not necessarily limited to paste up. It is my first attempt to channel into an artwork the chaos under the veil of modernism, the naive optimism and the unspoken anxieties that this city has been feeding me since I decided to call it home,” he says.

“It is also the first attempt a pasting above ground – definitely not perfected yet,” he says of the undulating flag that is a metaphor for the anxiety and discomfort of changes percolating inside notions of modernism, and perhaps nationalism today.

Using the streets as a laboratory to test new ideas and techniques, Mr. Barlo is not worried that pieces may cause confusion, because whether it is surrealism or classical Western ideas of figurative beauty, all of it can be reappropriated, sliced into pieces, pulled apart and examined from within.

But whatever the implied or opaque meanings, watchers of Mr. Barlo will tell you that his technique is definitely progressing.

“These wheatpastes represent quite a new way of working for me, given the limits of paper as a medium and the higher risk of seeing work that still took hours to be made being taken down right away,” he says as he stretches to describe the experience of going out and hitting up walls as night with a friend or two with these new one-of-a-kind and often cryptically themed posters that have hidden meaning known mainly to him.

“It has been a very refreshing approach that has allowed me to work on pieces that are more focused on one specific subject while trying to still infuse character and a sense of mystery into the work.”

“‘Sisyphus’ – aka your reward for walking all the way up on Aberdeen Street,” he says of this dung beetle. “This is the second attempt for this poster as the first was removed within 24h after I put it up, before I could even take a picture of it. Considering the title it was kind of hilarious.”

” ‘Softcore’ – I hadn’t drawn human features for so long but I got caught again by the beauty of the volumes that only the human figure can express,” he says of this neoclassical beauty. “The spot is also so right for it, just outside Sai Ying Pun MTR (train station.”

Like spinning multiple vinyl platters at 78, 45, and 33 RPMs on old beige school library record players, this is a low-fi mixmaster whose visual style stands singularly, compelling and jarring. You have just bumped into a new El Sol 25 on the street.

Digging through the reference bin of your art history and popular culture signatures, you may want to decode where this compositional collision evolves from. Picking the pieces apart there appears to be little in common with the classical, the folk, the agrarian, the Egyptian tunics, the Greek marble, Sioux head dresses, sports trading cards, Depression Era glass, gilt frames and 50s TV depictions of svelte domesticity.

Perhaps it is the painted technique that lifts them to a common vernacular, creating an amber nostalgia for a time that never existed in the collaged paintings from Street Artist El Sol 25. Like crocuses and tulips they have recently appeared plastered around Brooklyn in a new spring campaign and while you never know when he’s coming, you sure know when he’s arrived.

After wading through stacks of books and magazines, cutting and pasting limbs and feathers and tobacco leaves and intersex torsos together, he then paints enlarged versions of them by hand on butcher paper. He’s said that they speak to him, and so do the walls and doorways where they are pasted, and we have no reason to doubt it.

While we draw up short of saying we are fans to maintain an air of professionalism, he did rather tip the scale this time when we discovered that he painted a tribute to BSA on a popular spot in BK, and we’re sort of embarrassed — but of course we’ve already taken multiple selfies in front of it so clearly not that embarrassed. So there’s that. Even so, if the work had not been so consistently risk-taking and experimental and authentic in a pool of copycats, El Sol 25’s work would not have caught our eye and kept it.

He once told us in an interview that his inspiration comes from a multitude of sources, “I get my inspiration from everything from walking to work or bad music or bad films or great films or good days or bad days. I get my inspiration from everything. I’m dependent on my work spiritually so I really like the idea of incorporating anything and everything into it. I take inspiration not just from what I’ve put on a pedestal – I enjoy everything.”

So for the gluttonous visual omnivores that are continuously pawing through images on your phone looking for a new sugar rush, this is your man. Because these are one-of-a-kind, labor intensive paintings on paper that decay in the wind and rain, catch them while you can. His pieces don’t usually get tagged over but the shelf life is probably a year at most.

Overunder is a fast-moving free-associating surrealist whose Street Art pieces catch your eye as you skip past a run down neglected piece of property. Always balancing on the edge of your reality and his boundless imagination, the painted plumcake pieces will strum the brainwaves and may make you all skittish like a cat at a rocking chair convention.

As we start a new year, we say thank you for the last one.

And Thank You to the artists who shared their 11 Wishes for 2011 with Brooklyn Street Art; Conor Harrington, Eli Cook, Indigo, Gilf, Todd Mazer, Vasco Mucci, Kimberly Brooks, Rusty Rehl, Tip Toe, Samson, and Ludo. You each contributed a very cool gift to the BSA family, and we’re grateful.

We looked over the last year to take in all the great projects we were in and fascinating people we had the pleasure to work with. It was a helluva year, and please take a look at the highlights to get an idea what a rich cultural explosion we are all a part of at this moment.

The new year already has some amazing new opportunities to celebrate Street Art and artists. We are looking forward to meeting you and playing with you and working with you in 2011.